God's existence is not necessarily "threatening"

1) Vexen, you make the assumption that a belief in God is equal to a belief in a threat. Please explain why God's existence, in your view, is necessarily threatening. Could God's existence be encouraging? Loving? Could a person be as likely to be comforted by the existence of God as threatened by it? If the existence of God threatens you, does that mean it necessarily threatens others?

2) You make the clear point that there is no such thing as human objectivity. Why, then, have you wasted yours and our time by making arguments? Aren't your equally subjective views as likely to be erroneous as mine? If we are all so totally unable to comprehend objective truth, then perhaps we should stop this inane and worthless dialogue, since we're all potentially right...and potentially wrong.

3) Please don't leave my comment unanswered, or else it will just be another meaningless contribution to an already meaningless debate...at least according to the "subjectivity" rule.

Re: God's existence is not necessarily "threatening"

1) Dude. The issue is the evidence, not whether or not belief in God is threatening or comforting. There are many things that are comforting (the belief that I will win the lottery, for example), but it doesn't make them true. Likewise with threatening things; people may be scared of imaginary monsters or imaginary gods... but the fact that some people are scared of them, doesn't make them real.

2) No, all Human thoughts and beliefs can be subjected to scrutiny and perhaps shown to be false. We all have to look for evidence to back up or discredit our views. We might all be potentially right or potentially wrong, but, individual claims about reality can of course be checked. Then, at least, we'll be right-or-wrong together.

Re: God's existence is not necessarily "threatening"

It's very true that "no Human being can think objectively without personal opinion confusing his thinking."

That means that if we are left to ourselves we have only (and at best) interprafacts.

However (and what I am about to say is both true, and hold's up logically), the fact that we are not 100% objective, does not in and of itself dictate that there can be no absolute morals.

_____________

On a similar note, you should be careful to not be to loose when you group monotheists together. There are large amounts of similar area, but your treatment is oversimplified. The fact is there are valid, dichotomous differences that leave each of them very separate.

I will not claim to be an expert on Islam or Judaism or even Christianity, but I've done some extensive study on each. It's not an aprropriate argument to say:

"it is apparent that deities too realize that Human Beings can only interpret life subjectively, and that no text will mean the same thing for any two people. Therefore any sacred text can only contain "guidelines" or pointers to moral codes of behaviour, and no actual absolutes."

It's simply not true, especially of the Jewish and Christian texts. Both internal and external evidences would say just the opposite... That they DO contain absolutes.

Certainly we can still argue the validity of the biblical texts, and we can certainly still argue the validity of any absolute morals.

We simply can not (if we are to be intellectually honest) use sacred scripts as a proof, when the evidence overwhelmingly goes the other way.

--------------

By the by, you most certainly don't have to post a reply... You won't hurt my feelings either way.

Re: God's existence is not necessarily "threatening"

Because texts *say* they are absolute doesn't mean that we can ever know if there are. Even if there was a human consensus, the actual absoluteness of the statement would not ascertainable.

If there are absolutes, then, human understanding couldn't realize them. Even the laws of physics only apply under known circumstances, and they are more certain than complex moral laws. Morals depend on language, species-wide ways of thinking, and other such things that just don't endear them towards being possibly "absolute".

It might help such an abstract conversation if you were to state an example of an absolute moral.